Learnt lessons of effective product management

In my latest article I decided to change my blog to another platform. A positive change of job happened and it has taken most of my energy, so we'll just continue on this platform. Actually the job change has sent me out of my comfort zone and made me think of growing business through products in a bit of a different light - and I got to admin, I love it. Being able to learn new things is something what I really live for, and this is a really good opportunity.

The main idea of product management is to find the best market fit and develop the offering to match that market inline with the company strategy. That means that in many cases you have to know something about every function of the company and know how they affect each other. Below are some tips I've learned along the way that have helped me to succeed (or at least cope) on the PM role

Know your customers - and keep learning from them

That's that. Every PM post has it "Know your customers". And even though it seems like a simple thing, it's probably the most complex issue you just keep learning from. Who are your customers you sell to? What do they do, what problem they have? Who are the decision makers? How they are doing things? What is their most important problem to solve? What kind of values they have that affect buying decisions? What interest them and what is the channel where you find them?... It's about finding the market fit and creating a relationship with the products or services to obtain long term business relationship that benefits both - customer and the provider. In the end everything from UX design, problem you solve and feel of the service or product affects it. Bring the experience to be the diamond by listening and learning from your customers.

Trust your team

PM's are thought to be the mini CEO's, even though I think it's really provocative way to attract new ambitious people to PM. It's mostly BS, but it has it's point. PM usually has to work his way out throughout the company and all of it's processes. From sales and marketing to development and delivery. Even though you should be multitalented in some way, you can't be the expert of everything. Don't try to dictate, but be the glue and let the experts shine, be the catalyst. I have had an excellent opportunity to work with real experts that can challenge and innovate all the time. Communicate more and do less, let people get excited about the next goal and see it get done through. This way you even get the whole team and even multiple teams behind the tasks and succeeding is inevitable!

Learn continuously - and learn fast

Failing fast is known for everyone. Failing is nice, you got to love it, but it's really hard to convince your co-workers to do their job and celebrate on failure. It's much easier to run towards the goal and to improve it from learning fast to reach the ultimate target. This can be achieved by reducing the cycle of learning and testing by doing things with testing them in real life as cheap and as fast as possible. Just measure what ever you are doing to get fast feedback, set minimum success criteria (money spent vs. money received, money spent to acquire a lead etc.) to see whether you reached your goal. And if it didn't work, you at least learned something and can try the next thing - fast and cheap. Find the cheapest way, measure it and learn from it to do the next experiment. It's much faster to develop in small increments than first polish the diamond and then realize that it just didn't work. When you learn something, get to the next stage.

Be paranoid - realize you're only assuming

Everything that isn't proven is only assumption. Be paranoid about yourself, test your assumptions against your co-workers and against your customers. Find hypotheses that back up your assumptions and develop tests against those. I've done a lot of assumptions in history and always thought that I was right, customers said they were thinking the same - many times we all ended up being wrong. By realizing that the truth you know is an assumption, you can save a lot of time and effort. Just learn from it, and do it fast, do the experiments and measure.

Be a dick - but not a total dick

People tend to get a mission from sales or from single customer needs that are not aligned with the big picture. A lot of times as a PM you just have to be a dick and say no. Customers don't want nice tech, they want value for their everyday life. I think fitness watches are a excellent proof of this. The ones that measure heart rate from the wrist are not as accurate and technically good than the ones with heart rate monitoring around from the chest. It's just too far from the heart. Still at least I would prefer the one with hr measurement from wrist, since it's easier - and it's accurate enough for my needs! I wonder if the developers of the one that measures HR around the chest were thinking "That doesn't do the work, it's just crappy implementation since because of it's inaccuracy". Well, for sunday jogger it is just what they want. Thank god someone said "No, but it's not as easy!" when it was discussed.

Good things tend to pollinate

This is something weird. Whenever you get to discover something nice, let's say a service definition of product that wraps technology in customer understood form of continuous service. Talk about it in different places and see how the company reacts. Many times the good ideas start to pollinate around the company even if they are not totally ready. If it pollinates, people believe in it and it has a really good position to succeed. You kind of can do an internal test with things with it. It's not absolute truth, some times the way you rephrase and show your own enthusiasm might affect it, but at least it's something to assume and test. Good things tend to pollinate, bad things don't.

Hide and automate complexity

For the last one I think that every time new things are developed iteratively, they tend to get really complex. Keep them simple. Simple to use and simple to buy. The more complexity is behind the scenes, the better. The customer won't see the complexity if they can predict the behaviour of your actions and how the products act. Hide the details and try to automate them as much as possible. Reduce the complexity and provide easy contact points for the customers, automate the most tedious tasks if possible to reduce work involved, but remember that automating things is optimizing. Prove them right first before doing perfect processess.

So. In the end, whether you work in the development (SW,HW) marketing, sales, or anywhere. These are my top things of getting the job done and getting the kicks out of the job, hope that someone can relate.